Man admits murders in suicide note

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 7:00 pm, Wednesday, March 9, 2005

CHICAGO (AP) - A man who filed bizarre, rambling lawsuits over his cancer treatment and shot himself to death during a traffic stop appears to be the lone killer of a federal judge's mother and husband, police said late Thursday.

DNA on a cigarette butt found after the killings matches that of Chicago electrician Bart Ross, who claimed responsibility for the slayings in a suicide note, authorities said Thursday night.

Chicago police spokesman David Bayless said the state police crime lab confirmed the link and that the evidence points to Ross being the lone killer.

"The DNA match, with all the other evidence, certainly convinces us that Ross is the offender in the Lefkow family homicide," Bayless said. He stopped short of saying the investigation was closed.

Police Superintendent Phil Cline said earlier Thursday that in addition to the suicide note, Ross also fit a witness description of a man seen leaving Lefkow's home the day of the killings.

Ross, 57, committed suicide Wednesday outside Milwaukee in West Allis, Wis., after a police officer pulled him over because of broken taillights on his van.

Cline would not speculate on what Ross was doing in the area. But at least one other judge who ruled against him lived there. And a source close to the investigation told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the suicide note, found in Ross' van, contained the names of judges.

Lefkow came home Feb. 28 to find her 64-year-old husband, Michael Lefkow, and 89-year-old mother, Donna Humphrey, shot to death in the basement.

Investigators earlier had suspected the slayings may have been the work of white supremacists angry over another of Lefkow's rulings. But Ross had no known connections to extremist groups.

Last fall, the judge had dismissed a lawsuit in which Ross accused doctors of disfiguring him when they treated him for cancer in the early 1990s. Among other things, he claimed doctors committed a "terrorist act" by giving him radiation without his consent.

Cline said that after Ross killed himself, police and federal agents found a note in which he implicated himself in the murders of Michael Lefkow and Humphrey and recounted the details.

WMAQ-TV in Chicago said it also received a handwritten letter signed by a Bart Ross on Thursday in which the writer describes breaking into the Lefkow house around dawn. The writer said he planned to wait in the basement all day for the judge and kill her.

But he said the judge's husband discovered him around 9 a.m., so he shot him, then killed Lefkow's mother after she heard the gun and called out to her son-in-law, the TV station reported.

"After I shot husband and mother of Judge Lefkow, I had a lot of time to think about life and death. Killing is no fun, even though I knew I was already dead. I gave up further killings on about 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 28, 2005, and left Judge Lefkow's house," the station quoted the letter as saying.

Ross emigrated from Poland in 1982 as Bartlomiej Ciszewski, changed his name and became a U.S. citizen in 1988, according to the government.

Ross had waged a decade-long legal fight over his cancer treatment, which left his face disfigured. He battled with doctors, lawyers and judges, likening his treatment to the ghastly medical experiments done by the Nazis.

In a lawsuit dismissed by Lefkow last September, Ross claimed doctors at the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital and its clinic had damaged his mouth and caused him to lose his teeth when they treated him for cancer from 1992 into 1995. He also blamed the justice system for his problems and demanded Congress impeach four judges.

The hospital released a statement saying Ross consented to and received conservative treatments after a "grave diagnosis of metastatic head and neck cancer."

Court records show Ross was also being evicted from his North Side home and was due Thursday in housing court.